because he had a key to the house and Mayhew knew about the Law of Truly Large Numbers because he’d seen a special on the Discovery Channel and Claire was some kind of paranoid housewife with nothing better to do than smear the reputation of the man who had spent his every waking moment trying to please her?
Claire looked at the orange prescription bottle on her desk. Percocet. The top was off because she’d already taken one. Paul’s name was on the label. The directions said: TAKE AS NEEDED FOR PAIN. Claire was certainly in pain. She used the tip of her finger to topple over the bottle. Yellow pills spilled onto her desktop. She placed another Percocet on her tongue and washed it down with a sip of wine.
Suicides ran in families. She had learned this during a class on Hemingway taught by an ancient professor who seemed himself to have one foot in the grave. Ernest had used a shotgun. His father had done the same. There was a sister and brother, a granddaughter, maybe others whom Claire could not recall but she knew that they’d all died by their own hands.
Claire looked at the Percocet spilled across her desktop. She moved the pills around like pieces of candy.
Her father had ended his life with an injection of Nembutal, a brand of pentobarbital used to euthanize animals. Death by respiratory arrest. Before the injection, he had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills with a vodka chaser. It was two weeks before the six-year anniversary of Julia’s disappearance. He’d had a mild stroke the month before. His suicide note was written in a shaky hand on a torn-off sheet of notebook paper:
To all of my beautiful girls—I love you with every piece of my heart. Daddy
Claire recalled a long-ago weekend spent at her father’s dismal bachelor apartment. During the day, Sam had done all the things that recently divorced fathers do with their children: bought her clothes he couldn’t afford, taken her to a movie her mother had forbade her to see, and let her eat so much junk food that she’d almost been comatose by the time he’d finally brought her back to the sickly pink room with pink sheets that he’d decorated especially for her.
Claire had been well past her pink years. Her room at home was painted robin’s-egg blue with a multicolored wedding quilt on the bed and absolutely no stuffed animals but one, which she kept sitting in the rocking chair that had belonged to her mother’s father.
Around midnight, the hamburgers and ice cream had commenced an ungodly battle inside Claire’s stomach. She had run to the bathroom only to find her father sitting in the tub. He wasn’t taking a bath. He was wearing his pajamas. He had his face buried in a pillow. He was sobbing so uncontrollably that he barely noticed when she turned on the lights.
“I’m sorry, Sweetpea.” His voice had been so soft that she had to bend down to hear it. Oddly, as she’d knelt by the tub, Claire had imagined that this was what it might be like one day when she bathed her own children.
She’d asked, “What is it, Daddy?”
He’d shaken his head. He wouldn’t look at her. It was Julia’s birthday. He had spent the morning at the sheriff’s office going through her case file, looking at photographs of her old dorm room, her bedroom at the house, her bike that sat chained outside the student center for weeks after she was gone. “There are just some things you can’t unsee.”
Every argument between her parents featured some variation of Helen telling Sam to just move on. Given the choice between her seemingly cold mother and her broken hull of a father, was it any wonder that later in life, Claire’s court-appointed therapist had accused her of not being forthcoming with her feelings?
Her father overflowed with feeling. You couldn’t stand near him without absorbing some of the sorrow that seemed to radiate from his chest. No one who looked at him saw a whole human being. His eyes were perpetually weepy. His lips trembled from dark thoughts. He had night terrors that eventually got him evicted from his apartment complex.
Toward the end when Claire would stay with him—honestly, when her mother forced her to stay with him—Claire would lie in bed and press her hand to the thin wall between their bedrooms and feel the vibrations as her father’s screams filled the air. Eventually, he would wake